In the early 20th century, a favourite Zionist slogan spoke of the return of “a people without a land to a land without a people ”. British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (“nobody’s land”), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history. China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country. In 1931 the Japanese army staged mock attacks on itself to justify its invasion of China, and then created the fake country of Manchukuo to legitimise its conquests. But if this is the era of post-truth, when, exactly, was the halcyon age of truth? In the 1980s? The 1950s? The 1930s? And what triggered our transition to the post-truth era – the internet? Social media? The rise of Putin and Trump?Ī cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree. Whichever side you support, it seems that we are indeed living in a terrifying era of post-truth, when not just particular military incidents, but entire histories and nations might be faked. Rather, these fake countries are the Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic that Russia has set up to mask its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists would certainly agree with Russian nationalists that there are some fake countries around. Don’t they have a say about who they are? Most importantly, it ignores what millions of Ukrainians think about themselves. It also violates numerous international laws and treaties that Russia has previously accepted and that have safeguarded the sovereignty and borders of independent Ukraine. To claim that Ukraine does not exist as a nation and as an independent country disregards a long list of historical facts – for example, that during the thousand years of supposed Russian unity, Kiev and Moscow were part of the same country for only about 300 years.
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Ukrainian citizens, outside observers and professional historians may well be outraged by this explanation, and regard it as a kind of “atom-bomb lie” in the Russian arsenal of deception. For many Russian nationalists, the idea that Ukraine is a separate nation from Russia constitutes a far bigger lie than anything uttered by President Putin during his holy mission to reintegrate the Russian nation.
Following the Mongols, the Poles, the Swedes, Napoleon’s Grande Armée and Hitler’s Wehrmacht, in the 1990s it was Nato, the US and the EU that attempted to destroy Russia by detaching parts of its body and forming them into “fake countries” such as Ukraine.
According to Russian national myths, Russia is a sacred entity that has endured for a thousand years despite repeated attempts by vicious enemies to invade and dismember it. Russia was engaged in a just war, and if it is OK to kill for a just cause, surely it is also OK to lie? The higher cause that allegedly justified the invasion of Ukraine was the preservation of the sacred Russian nation. Russian nationalists can excuse this lie by arguing that it served a higher truth. As they voiced this rather preposterous claim, Putin and his aides knew perfectly well that they were lying. The Russian government and President Vladimir Putin in person repeatedly denied that these were Russian troops, and described them as spontaneous “self-defence groups” that may have acquired Russian-looking equipment from local shops. Thus, in late February 2014, Russian special units bearing no army insignia invaded Ukraine and occupied key installations in Crimea. W e are repeatedly told these days that we are living in a new and frightening era of “post-truth”, and that lies and fictions are all around us.
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